With the emergence of collision avoidance systems over the past few years, they need a standard way to test the systems. And since they’re testing avoidance, not the safety during collisions themselves, the goal was to design a repeatable test framework that doesn’t ruin the vehicles if they fail.

So basically - @java is literally helping to set the standard of on-board collision avoidance safety testing. http://t.co/2KhBYD2IM4

There’s two main parts to the test framework. First, automating the test vehicles to ensure they are all being driven in a standard and repeatable manner. Second, automating the the targets that must be “avoided” by the cars.

The goal is that the robotic driver of the cars be adaptable to any car claiming to have a collision avoidance system, so it’s designed to be a drop-in kit. Here you can see the steering chassis:

And this is the robotic car driving system, hooked into a very new and real Subaru Legacy. http://t.co/iB5D0ptfBi

Next up is the target robot platform (literally, and figuratively it’s a platform). The idea of the platform is to be able to host a variety of foam moving targets that should be avoided — and yet if they’re not, the worst case is some broken foam. The car will simply roll over the platform.

Pictures are deceiving – this platform weighs over 600lbs when fully assembled, only 4″ high and can move at over 50mph. All that and a car can run over it at high speeds without damaging either. It’s still a prototype version, so a bit messy with the wiring, but this picture should give a better sense of how it all fits:

At the end of the day, I was able to take a spin in the Java-driven Subaru. They didn’t quite trust me with the “kill switch”, but the view from the pax seat was better anyways as I could get a good view of the steering and location systems at work.